Good to see You here again this morning! Thanks for so faithfully following my posts. For today I have chosen a subject, which really excites me and makes me very proud and happy. When I got freshly started as President of Vulkan do Brasil in Itatiba in September 2014, one of my first activities was, to get familiar with our product portfolio and to understand details about our products and their typical applications. Our engineers gave me theoretical training lessons und my colleagues in our factory showed me how we manufacture our different products. This gave me already a quite good background, but was still very theoretical. The real understanding, for which applications our products finally serve, came during several visits to customers in the different industries, which we typically attend. You cannot imagine, how impressive it was for somebody as curious and generally interested in technology as me, to see with his own eyes a big open pit iron ore mine, an entire steel factory or a sugar mill. Until then I had made plenty of experience during my different career steps with many other industries, like automotive, consumer goods, pharmaceutical, chemical plants, oil refineries etc. But to see the huge and powerful mining machinery was definitely a new dimension of experience.
Due to the experience which I have made during my so far 35 years long professional career in so many different industries, I have meanwhile become fairly skilled in confronting myself quite easily with new products, technologies, processes, customers, businesses and industries and in finding fast ways for learning and understanding the basics of these. Otherwise I would not have been able, to execute my general management functions at all these companies and industries successfully.
In the case of Vulkan do Brasil, my early contact with our industrial products and their applications at our customers gave me the strong feeling, that we needed to “polish our shoes”, to introduce some modern technologies and to create additional new funtionalities. It was evident, that we needed to update several of our products, which already had come into their years, in order to extend their application opportunities and – for sure – also with the objective to easen and standardize manufacturing, shorten our lead times and reduce our manufacturing costs. I was pretty aware, that because of the at that time notably and very fast arriving new deep economical & political crisis in our as beautiful as suffering country, we needed to reinforce the walls of our castle in Itatiba. But not without at the same time going out into the stormy sea of troubled economic waters and generate massive exportation of our products to new customers allover the whole Latin American region, where – with the only exception of Chile, where our faithful distributor Andres Puglisevich and his company SCEM Ltda were already successfully representing our company and distributing our industrial products – we until then practically had not been offering yet and much less selling our products and services.
But it was clear for me that, in order to master all the obvious obstacles on this stony way, means fierce competition, long distances and complicated logistics, we needed to improve our pre-conditions for becoming able to get really started in doing this and becoming successful. This made me decide, to create a development department for products, processes and applications – our new baby DPPA was born. In January 2015 Josias Leal, so far Operations & Engineering Manager of Vulkan do Brasil, was oficially appointed as Development Director and within approximately six months Josias, with myself as the stake holder and fully supported by all other management teams members of our company, set up his initial team of development engineers, recruited several new employees, created our standardized development process for new products and all necessary internal work structures and processes.
That`s how we got started and learned to fly. During the first year our development department DPPA was mainly occupied with its own organisational set up, the critical analisis – very much based on customer experience – of our whole product portfolio of in total approximately 2000 different products, variants and sizes of products – all kinds of couplings, brakes and backstops for all industrial applications You can imagine. To be true this was a very important but not so much exciting period. Josias and his team needed to focus on this extremely important work, but could not really get started yet on the development of really new products during this first year.
This situation changed completely during the following years since wet set up during early 2016 our first development project plan and started in parallel with the development of the first few of totally new products. And during 2017-2019 several fantastic new couplings and brakes, after intensive testing in our in-house test center – which actually has been created by Josias and his DPPA team during the same time – became ready for getting oficially presented to our customers and launched on the different markets. To finally present a new product to the public and start the sale of it, is the highest excitement and satisfaction You can imagine for development engineers and there is nothing more appropriate and just, than to celebrate this together with all contributers on ocasion of a wonderful brazilian barbeque with ice cold beers and caipirinha. As mentioned already in my first post “Personal & Professional Experiences & Insights”, which has also become the name of my blog, I am deeply convinced of the importance of the appeal “after action – satisfaction”.
As You can see, in the year of it`s 5th anniversary, our DPPA (“Desenvolvimento de Produtos, Processos e Aplicações” resp. “Development of Products, Processes and Applications”) has developped from a small baby to a youngster, collected lots of information and experience and is following adjusted internal target strategies highly successful, but with the same passion, dedication and excitement, as during the first weeks when we started with it for the first time about 5 years ago.
I selected a picture for this post which shows our actual DPPA team – since two years very nicely led by our colleague Marcel Morais, Development Manager – after our oficial internal 5th anniversary event at Vulkan do Brasil`s factory in Itatiba, Sao Paulo, and shortly before our wonderful “after action – satisfaction” party.
During future posts I will give some more insights into our experience and success with the development of new products and technologies and I will also present to You in one of my future posts our “Brain” group, which is something very special and was also proudly invented by Josias, Marcel and myself as a spin-off from our DPPA two years ago. You will love it.
See You – hopefully – again here tomorrow after the publication of my 2nd sunday post since the start of this blog exactly ten days ago.
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